Married By Mistake

With sudden urgency he added, “Casey, I don’t want us to part like this.”
    She summoned a faint smile as she thanked him for the keys and climbed into the car. But about their relationship, there was nothing left to say.
    She drove off with a crunching of the unfamiliar stick shift that would have made a lesser man wince.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
    E VER SINCE C ASEY HAD COME into his life, nothing had gone according to plan. Things hadn’t gone wrong, exactly, Adam acknowledged, but if right meant “as planned,” then they hadn’t gone right, either.
    It certainly wasn’t right that he should be sitting in Casey’s non-air-conditioned car in rush hour traffic on a stinking hot evening a week after she’d left. Why was he still driving this heap of scrap iron, of which the most valuable part was the new starter motor he’d bought earlier this week?
    He could have taken a cab to the office each day. Instead, however unwillingly, he squeezed into the Fiesta and suffered the ignominy of being seen in a car sporting a Honk If You Think I’m Sexy bumper sticker, which had proven impossible to remove—and boy, had he tried. And all this because the car smelled, somehow, of Casey.
    He scowled at the attractive woman in the BMW alongside, who had honked several times. That was another thing. There was no such thing as simple enjoyment of the opposite sex anymore. Adam used to admire the scenery as much as the next man, but these days, it seemed the sole purpose of the female species was to remind him of Casey.
    If she and her pop psychology were right—that he was sublimating his wild side by driving an Aston Martin—what did it mean that he’d given her his precious car to drive? And that he hadn’t worried about it while it was gone? Did that mean he was emasculated?
    Don’t go there.
    Adam was only too aware that he teetered on the brink of something he’d assiduously avoided his whole life. At least, he hoped he was still on the brink—that he hadn’t yet fallen in the kind of love that turned a guy’s world upside down and clouded his logic. The kind that made him believe in preposterous happy endings that in reality just didn’t happen. Or if they did they didn’t last and you ended up like Eloise, fixated on the past. Surely it wasn’t too late to get back to his orderly and—he was proud to admit it—predictable life?
    Only it wasn’t proving that easy. He’d been distracted in the office, impatient with his staff and less than polite to his stepmother. What really bugged him was that Eloise didn’t even take offense, just smirked every time he grunted or snapped.
    But what irked him most of all was Casey’s parting gift. She’d phoned Mrs. Lowe and begged the housekeeper to come back to work for Adam. And the grumpy old bat was driving him nuts. How could he ever have thought she was a treasure?
    Casey’s writing conference would be finished by now, and she should have returned his Aston Martin. But he didn’t want to call her cell phone, for fear that, hearing her voice, he might give in to the seductive urge to stop obsessing about the business, remarry Casey and just enjoy life. Because what kind of sense did that make?
    And Eloise had rolled her eyes when he’d asked her to help get his car back, even though he knew she was still in contact with Casey.
    He needed a distraction from his distraction. There was probably a psychological term for it; he must ask—
    Cancel that.
    By the time he got home, Adam was hot, uncomfortable and sick of being honked at. Did the women of Memphis have nothing better to do? In a fit of pique, he hurled Casey’s car keys into the garden, where they sank out of sight into a yew hedge. Ha! Temptation removed. Now he’d have no choice but to take a cab to work.
    Pleased that he’d taken the first step toward banishing Casey from his head, Adam checked the answering machine. Instead of deleting all the messages from women who’d called to tell him how sorry they were to read of his annulment in the newspaper this week, he called a couple back and arranged to meet for a drink over the next few evenings. No more sitting around the empty house.
    And he’d better sort out his costume for Eloise’s birthday party, which was a masked ball in the traditional style of her youth. The party wasn’t for a couple of months, but it didn’t hurt to be prepared.
    Adam whistled cheerfully as he signed on to the Internet and began surfing the Web sites of costume